Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Saturday, 2 May 2020
Checking Clive Palmer's hydroxchloroquine ads, Bill Gates COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and the problem with Facebook
Kate
Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington, told The Markup
that by allowing advertisers to target such people, Facebook was taking
"advantage of this sort of vulnerability that a person has once they're
going down these rabbit holes, both to pull them further down and to
monetise that".
Facebook has since removed the pseudoscience category from its ad manager.
NewsGuard, an online trust tool, also found Facebook’s
misinformation-fighting practices to be lacking, revealing that it had
identified 31 Facebook pages, with an audience of 21 million people, as
"super-spreaders" of coronavirus misinformation.
The
researchers say that the pages continue to publish "blatant
misinformation", even where there was evidence of coordinated
inauthentic behaviour, which violates Facebook’s policies.
"Of
the posts we have identified so far publishing COVID-19 misinformation,
63% did not have any warning or fact-check link attached to the
post," NewsGuard noted.
Can UV light kill a virus?
Supporters
of US President Donald Trump have taken to social media to defend his
musings that "powerful light" and disinfectant could possibly be used to
kill the novel coronavirus inside human bodies.
This Facebook post, which makes claims about "internal disinfectant" has been debunked.(Supplied)
One such Facebook post claims
that when Mr Trump talked of internal disinfectant, he was referring to
"Ultraviolet Radiation" administered into the body. According to the
post, the method kills bacteria and has been "used for a while now".
"Just because it’s called a 'disinfectant' doesn’t mean it’s Pine-Sol," the post states.
PolitiFact found that
while the post may be referring to a treatment called "ultraviolet
blood irradiation", used mainly in the alternative-medicine community,
there was no evidence such treatments could kill viruses or bacteria.
From Washington, D.C.
A
report by the US State Department has found that Russian, Chinese and
Iranian coronavirus disinformation narratives echo one another.
According to Politico,
the report warned that the three countries were using the coronavirus
pandemic to launch a "disinformation onslaught" against the US.
Messages
spread by the three include that the coronavirus is an American
bioweapon, that the Chinese response to the virus was superior to that
of the US, and that the US economy wouldn't be able to handle the
crisis.
The report found that some of the
disinformation was pushed by state-run media outlets, as well as
governments themselves. In one example, a website run by the Russian
Defence Ministry is said to have promoted a conspiracy theory that Bill
Gates had a hand in creating the virus.
Politico
also noted that the State Department had discovered that, while the
three governments had pushed out the same messages in the past, the
coronavirus pandemic had accelerated the convergence of disinformation
narratives.
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